HN user
Don't you remember the time that people were solving the 'Strait of Hormuz' crisis on LinkedIn with lines drawn on maps and showing their 'problem-solving' skills?
... or was it just my feed?
Is it arguing that we need to supervise better than building systems that enable agents to make better decisions?
I would argue that unique decisions should only be made once (I'm building it). It is a gated mechanism, where confidence is 0<x<y<1 >y - decision delegated from x to y - rapid decision, upto 5 lines of context and simplified ask <x - full context for elaborate decision
Everything <y is fed back for making decisions. Plus, decisions are logged with fragments/context used.
By Amdahl's law, you'd have to automate 99.9% of decision-making to reach 1000x, 100x is at 99%. That's near impossible unless y is closer to 0, i.e., near unbound delegation.
I believe we have been there before; we responded with a similar emotional-visceral response during the printing press (replication of information), the industrial revolution (human labour), and the internet (distribution of information).
Now it's AI (cognition/human judgement); technological gains solve the bottlenecks. This is yet another layer. Amdahl's law.
I believe human societies will be a bell-curve distribution of all of them. The scary fraction will wield power/wealth; the indifferent will be the largest distribution, followed by the smallest fraction of benevolent people.
Thank you! This changed how I was thinking about my product: a knowledge harness for coding agents. While I was discussing incidents & context-switching tax, the structural compounding is likely the real win.
The issue could be a matter of outrage, though, here in India the FOMO by parents (and students) is rather structural - been on since forever whether it is likes of Aptech/NIIT since late 90s.
Here are some pointers: High-school science grds that seek STEM undergrad education in India is over 5-million annually. Commerce & Humanities is looked down upon as barely has any value in terms career prospects (Some top high-schools don't even offer Humanities). For STEM subjects, over 5-million aspirants compete for less than 100K 'meaningful' seats - cuthroat yet?
FOMO in the failed education system is structural. Else to blame companies from byjus, to unacademy, to upgrad, all of which claim to deliver on "Career Changing Education" at high-markups, is lame!